OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion is out and it’s a great release. One of the most important new features of Mountain Lion is a security setting called Gatekeeper.

Gatekeeper allows you to specify what kinds of applications are allowed to run on your Mac. The default setting allows applications from the Mac App Store and identified developers. What are identified developers?

Identified Developers

An identified developer is someone who has signed up for the Mac Developer Program. With this program membership, a developer can get their application digitally signed by Apple. This application will run without complaint in Mountain Lion.

AppTrap Today

So what happens when you try to install AppTrap in Mountain Lion today? This happens:
Note that this only happens when you try to install the preference pane. If you already had AppTrap installed before upgrading to Mountain Lion then you won’t see this dialog at all and AppTrap will run just fine. However those who are trying to install AppTrap in Mountain Lion will see the above dialog.

Workaround

In the meantime, you can avoid this issue by right-clicking on AppTrap and clicking Open. The resulting dialog box looks very similar to the standard Gatekeeper one above, but it also has an Open button. Click that and AppTrap should install itself into System Preferences and run normally.

End Goal

The only way for me to make this dialog disappear is to sign up as a Mac Developer Program member for a $100 annual fee. With that membership I can digitally sign AppTrap. But I simply don’t have the money. I’m already paying for the iOS Developer Program membership which costs another $100 per year and I’m a student whose last term and associated tuition is coming up in September.

That doesn’t mean that I won’t get the membership. I just won’t be able to get it until next year. In the meantime, the above workaround will have to do.

Earlier this year, I moved onnati.net to MobileMe. Then Apple announced iCloud and that MobileMe’s domain-name feature would be removed. With iCloud’s release just around the corner, I need to move the website to a new host. I’ve bought the hosting, but the real work is in moving all of the website content over to the new host. As such, onnati.net will be down for a period of time this weekend while I get everything sorted out. Keep an eye on this blog or my Twitter account for updates.

In my last post I said that AppTrap 1.x was going to continue working on Leopard. I will have to backpedal on that and drop support for Leopard. I have not received any feedback from any Leopard users. And since I have no Macs running Leopard I am unable to continue testing for that operating system.

I released the AppTrap 1.1.7 Beta yesterday. I’ve had some internal betas circulating with one of the localizers, so that’s why you’re seeing Beta 3 instead of Beta 1.

The reason this is a beta is because I’ve moved over to the new 10.6 SDK and I’ve changed some of the build settings around. I also inadvertently moved development over to Xcode 4, not knowing that it had dropped PowerPC support. Luckily, Xcode 4’s project files are backwards compatible with Xcode 3.2 (which has PPC support), so I’ve moved back to that. This beta is just to ensure that I didn’t screw anything up for Leopard users or PPC users. So, if you’re a PPC Leopard user, I’d love to hear your feedback. I really just want to make sure that it works as expected.

Although I don’t want to drop PPC support for AppTrap 1.x, I do plan on dropping it, along with 10.5 support, for 2.0.

I just thought I’d reassure everybody that AppTrap is not discontinued. I am in the process of having of the domain transferred so that it is under my control. I am extremely sorry for this and will have an alternate, temporary download site up soon.

Update:
The site is up at an alternate location. I’m still working on getting the original domain name.

As evidenced by version 1.1.6 I am still working on
AppTrap. However there has been a noticeable lack of communication
on my part. For that, I am sorry. With this post and others soon to
follow I will try to rectify that.

If you want to follow my terrible ramblings on subjects that are not AppTrap, you can follow
me over at my tumblr blog.

I’m also working on version 1.2 of AppTrap. I’m not going to say when I’ll be able to share information with you guys, as I don’t want to get any hopes up. All I can say is that I’ve recently been putting more time into development. If you want, you can find what I’ve been working on in this branch of SVN repository. 🙂